“Trust me.”
These two words are meant to be a reassurance, usually because you trust the person using them whether it’s your sibling, your best friend, or maybe a colleague. But when the government says, “Trust me,” there’s only one reasonable response, and it’s three words long…
“No [expletive] way!”
In so much as we want to think that there was once a time that the government could be trusted without thinking about it, that’s not really the case. In the modern democratic order, our government system has checks and balances expressly for the reason that power can’t be trusted sitting in just one place and it can’t be trusted without oversight and analysis. That’s where we, the press, come in.
Events since the beginning of this year have had me thinking a lot about trust, and power: What are we supposed to make a council that passes motions that are fully formed in closed session? What are we to make of a mayor that thinks he has to do it alone without his council? What happens when city staff doesn’t appear to listen?
More on this in a second, because I also want to work in another idea, and that is the rise and prevalence of anger in the electorate. People feel like they’re not being listened to, and they have a bullhorn app on their phone that can spread that anger with a few clicks on a keyboard. (And yes, I’ve been guilty of that too though I do occasionally think better of it before the tweet is finished.)
Despite the benefits of this democratization of speech and access, I fear that it’s done terrible things to the quality of leadership we’re getting, and you only need to look to the recent past to compare.
The passing of Brian Mulroney last week had many commentators noting his willingness to take big policy swings even if they were unpopular, but I wonder if Mulroney would have been so bold in the era of social media. I’ve long suspected that the future analysis of Justin Trudeau’s premiership will hinge on a perpetual sense of paralysis stemming from an unwillingness to choose a direction because someone’s going to yell about it and a few thousand people were going to like or retweet.
That’s why here in Guelph, I think the unbridled expression of anger, and the fact that our very online mayor sees all of it, has had a direct impact on some of the choices being made.
The announcement in November that Cam Guthrie was bringing a motion about homeless encampments and directing staff to develop a bylaw to govern the use of public spaces created an eruption of anger and outrage. More than 40 people signed up to delegate, and nearly 100 correspondences were received. Some were angry in defence of Guelph’s unhoused population; others were angry about local levels of government “letting” things get so bad.
The response to this outrage was to make it a topic of conversation for the in-camera portion of the one council meeting in January, meaning that there was no public report and no public debate. And out of that was a fully formed motion to direct staff to develop a new bylaw in 11 days, no muss and no fuss and no public feuding in the stocks of the council chamber.
It wasn’t too long after that when the mayor announced that he was going to use Strong Mayor Powers to direct staff to work on some initiatives, including a six-point shave to the 2025 city budget. He did this not in a venue where he could be asked questions by a suspicious media, and without advanced notice to his council colleagues, and he did it after expressing his commitment to work collaboratively with those same colleagues.
Then, last month at the Accessibility Advisory Committee, staff proposed a recommendation about voting methods for the 2026 election that did not seem to take into account the most important direction expressed by the members of that provincially mandated advisory board. The full debate had to be deferred as the committee meeting ran long but the fact that internet voting was not presented as an option after months of advocacy was not taken well.
Is it any wonder that there’s so much anger out there? I get it, I share it. I’ve been tilting at the windmill of transit for years, and last weekend someone posted a picture on “Overheard at Guelph” of someone at a bus stop, which is, like so many bus stops, a sign at the side of the road.
There was a lament about someone in the picture who had been waiting there for a long time with no where to sit, and no where he could go to be protected from the elements, and like clockwork the mayor appeared in the thread to say that he would be bringing this up with City staff at once!
Really? Just like that, huh?
It’s hard not to feel that bile gurgle up inside you knowing that you’ve been using a space like this to provide data and anecdotal evidence that there’s a huge gap between the City’s ambitions and the reality of using transit here, only to see one of the people you’ve been trying to talk directly to say, “Wow, you mean there’s a problem?”
And I have a pretty big platform in local politics, so I take my frustration in stride knowing that you readers often feel like you’re yelling into a void. Some of you have told me about it.
So what does council have to do? That’s the easy part, they need to listen. There seems to be only three scheduled city council meetings for March so what better time to hold some town halls, get out on the stump, or knock on some doors. Don’t talk about policy, don’t talk about master plans, don’t talk about agenda management, just listen.
Also, don’t talk about how you have the facts and others don’t. Politicians do not get to be the arbiters of what is and is not a fact, and even if that were permissible, our system is built with the understanding that trust is earned, not given. There’s a significant trust gap in our system right now, and if city hall wants to change that then they need to start doing the work, the work of listening.
